Leaders meeting could make history
Stars appear to align for flexing of municipal muscle
Mayors representing the majority of Canadians have descended on Toronto to hash out unified positions on transit and infrastructure funding, social housing, job creation and more.
The name “Federation of Canadian Municipalities” puts most people to sleep, but billions of dollars have flowed into their communities thanks to past flexing of the lobby group’s collective mayoral muscle.
That influence on senior governments, particularly Parliament Hill, has waxed and waned.
In 2015, however, the stars seemed aligned for FCM to add a significant hit to a long record that includes notable misses.
Among the 18 at the “big city mayor’s caucus summit” on Thursday are influential voices: Toronto’s John Tory, Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi, Montreal’s Denis Coderre and Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson.
Their heft will be brought to bear in a federal election year when all parties know key battlegrounds that will determine who governs for the next four years are urban, several of them in the GTA.
If successful, Canadians could see improved housing, transit and gridlock. Tall orders in the billions, but the FCM has delivered before
Politicians in charge of local governments in those battlegrounds are united in frustration at trying to run vibrant, prosperous and humane communities on property taxes.
As the mayors started to arrive Wednesday, Tory said he hopes they can find common positions and craft a compelling message based on job creation.
“These cities are the engines of economic growth and job creation, and we can do that if we do that in part- nership with (senior governments) on things like transit and infrastructure. I hope we can make real progress on that.”
The summit is expected to yield a handful of unified positions, recasting cities as drivers of, rather than passengers on, the economy, and as confident partners rather than junior members pleading or haranguing upwards.
Boring, perhaps, but if they succeed, Canadians after the next election could start to see better housing for the least fortunate, more spending room in city budgets for other priorities, quicker trips to more places on transit, more reliable water and waste systems, less gridlock and improved public safety.
Tall orders costing billions of dollars, but FCM has delivered before.
The federation’s biggest success in recent years came in 2005, when leaders including then-Toronto mayor David Miller helped persuade the then-Liberal government to approve a “new deal for cities.”
It included a share of federal gas tax revenues for municipalities, later made permanent and now worth more than $2 billion a year nationally, for projects ranging from transit to waste-water treatment to recreation.
When the economy sputtered badly in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with FCM leadership and promised stimulus spending that included billions for infrastructure such as roads, sewer systems and arenas. FCM misses include many demands that bounced off the Peace Tower like paper airplanes, and a protracted but ultimately futile crusade to give municipalities one cent of the GST.
Mayors huddled Thursday at the St. Andrew’s Club on King St. may well produce another impressive, ignored document.
But they might also set in motion a New Deal for Cities Mark II that would give cities a respected place at the grown-ups’ table and, ultimately, stable new sources of revenue that would benefit millions of Canadians.